What a very singular conceit The Congress serves up. It’s not every day you get to see a roughly 50/50 blend of live action and animation, starring Robin Wright as an aging and financially desperate Hollywood movie star called Robin Wright. For the Israeli director, Ari Folman, it’s a highly unexpected follow-up to his award-winning 2008 animated documentary about the Lebanon War, Waltz with Bashir.

On the surface they hardly look like companion pieces, yet when you look at the mechanisms of memory – the use of animation to render an elusive nightmare and explore the theme of personal and historical amnesia – the two films start to develop a kinship. In the early scenes here, Wright is addressed by her longtime agent (Harvey Keitel) and Jeff (Danny Huston), the head of a studio called Miramount, which has harboured her erratic career and now presents her with a once-in-a-lifetime offer.

They propose to “scan” her, and ask her to sign away the copyright to her own image, voice and entire personality, for use in whatever entertainment products of the future they wish to devise. The real-life Wright will have to go into forced retirement, with a healthy pay-off, while her digital avatars are set loose in movie contexts over which she’ll have no control whatsoever.

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The Huston and Keitel characters doff their caps to characters Wright played in her early days (The Princess Bride, Forrest Gump). But they also make her out to be a tricky customer, hard to cast well. Folman ignores, for his purposes, her thriving role on theNetflix TVseries House of Cards. He basically gives her no choice, if she wishes to support her two children (Kodi Smit-McPhee, Sami Gayle), with whom she lives in an extraordinary place, a converted plane hangar festooned with kites and next to an airport.

“No sci-fi,” Wright instructs her bosses. It’s a battle she loses, and also a wry joke: based in part on The Futurological Congress, a 1971 novel by Solaris author Stanisław Lem, this film could hardly be categorised any other way. We jump ahead 20 years in time, and like Alice entering Wonderland, Wright consents to becoming animated for about the next hour. She moves through a hallucinatory space where people get to live out their fantasies as bitmapped beings, opting out of their real-world troubles.

Using animation to suggest a fundamental falsehood, a shining lie, is a bold strategy on Folman’s part: it could easily backfire and seem like a betrayal of his medium. Almost exacerbating this risk, Wright’s performance outside this sequence is consistently fascinating. Few actresses have ever aged this convincingly over one film’s span, and she submits beautifully to all Folman’s conceits about “real” and “unreal” performance.

If The Congress doesn’t wholly come off, it may be because the singularity of its vision starts to wobble when parallel universes (which recall everything from The Matrix to Synecdoche, New York) enter the mix. When Wright searches to reconnect with her long-lost son, Folman's groping for an emotional catharsis that feels unearned and somehow overfamiliar. His film is an alluring curio, a protest against the digital frontier which gets stuck with a knotty internal paradox – it starts out as thoroughly its own experiment, and ends up like a counterfeit of too many others.